Hurricane cuts off 4 Cuban towns

Large chunks of rock hurled by Hurricane Matthew onto roads in eastern Cuba have cut off four towns, but no victims have been reported, authorities said Wednesday.
As the Caribbean’s fiercest hurricane in nearly a decade continued barrelling toward the Bahamas, Cuba tallied the damage in the province of Guantanamo, which was swept by winds of up to 220 kilometers (137 miles) per hour Tuesday. The towns of Baracoa, Imias, Maisi and San Antonio del Sur, all near the island’s eastern tip, have been cut off from the rest of the country by rocks picked up in the storm and scattered across the roads, said Deputy Defense Minister Ramon Espinosa Matin. The four towns have a total population of around 158,000 people.
Baracoa, a historic town that was the first Spanish settlement in Cuba, suffered major damage, said Espinosa.
“There was a lot of destruction in Baracoa. We don’t have any reports of lives lost, but the material losses are substantial,” he told journalists.
He said the situation was also “extremely complicated” in the other three towns, where the authorities are still trying to assess the extent of the damage.
The region was hit hard in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy, which killed 11 people here.
Matthew, which has killed at least nine people so far, pummeled Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba on Tuesday.
The storm, which made landfall as a Category Four hurricane, has been downgraded to Category Three, but is still causing alarm in the Bahamas and the East Coast of the United States.

Source: Arab News